Influencing Doctors

I'm not surprised when I read this recent study that shows that physicians are affected by pharmaceutical marketing. While in practice I often saw doctors prescribing extremely expensive new drugs which had much less expensive generic alternatives (which patients frequently requested). And politicians seem no different.

I was fortunate enough to go to McGill University medical school, where, even in the 1970s, we were not allowed to accept gifts from drug companies, and required to use generic, and not brand drug names.

In this study, Hadland SE et al. JAMA Intern Med 2018 May 14, researchers identified nearly 370,000 physicians who prescribed opioids in 2015. Of these, 7% received roughly US$9 million (≈$350 per physician) in nonresearch payments related to opioid products during 2014. About 2% of physicians received payments received $1000 or more. Total U.S. opioid prescriptions decreased slightly overall from 2014 to 2015 but increased among physicians who received payments; those who received payments wrote about 9% more opioid prescriptions than those who did not.

Drug companies were undoubtedly aware that they were contributing to their profits at the expense of the opioid epidemic in the US population.